Dear Billy T and Somerville/Medford News Weekly Speakup Line,

Dear taxpayers, our past water bills have been recently hijacked. Unless you pay your bill online, you will not know that your previous bills that were once retrievable on line, have disappeared.

If you received emails reminding you that your quarterly water bill is due, those too, I suspect are now terminated.

I received a bill close to the due date for July 2020, by mail from the Collector of Taxes, not the water department. I called 311 and provided the email of the treasury department only to be told the previous software program was changed due to a low bid and a new vendor is processing our bills. It is my understanding the taxpayers were given no advance notice of the changes, nor our consent. Oh, just blame it on covid. The city is closed until further notice, yet many other towns and cities are open. Can anyone explain why that is when covid cases are down?

The new site to pay water/sewer bills can be found through the city’s website as in past practices. Although,, it wasn’t completed and attempts to log in/set up an account was blocked. The following day, after complaining and writing to councilors, it worked. There is a tab that indicates you can see past bills. But when you try to retrieve the information there is nothing there.

Given the fact, for years, we have attended meetings on the steady increases of water and sewer without any accurate information provided to taxpayers or a willingness to fix our 200 year old sewer system— this should sound alarms..

While Union Square and Spring Hill are given preferential treatment including a new sewer and water system, the rest of us are left with a crumbling old sewer and just deal with ongoing issues..

Those of us who have been deceived by the city understand only too well what can happen when our sewer pipes fail.

I demanded they open the street only to find it was on them and they claimed the city had no money so they rerouted the pipe to another neighbor’s underground chimney which delivers waste to the main sewer line.

I provided testimony to several groups of residents some years ago as others did as well. Some residents suffered loses due to sewerage back up and had lawyers present in some cases..

We must demand they take care of all residents, not just their academic donors who are taking over our city. Write to your councilor and tell them we pay their salaries and they must treat everyone equal. It’s their job. They are not ambassadors, they are constituency service providers and must be reminded!

Concerned long time local resident